Competitions and Controversies

It’s September, which means it's time for the Interactive Fiction Competition. However, I didn’t expect IFcomp to be another battleground on which the AI conflict is playing out. I thought it was a settled issue ("you'll get AI and like it"), but Bruno Dias wrote a blog post about how “Slop comes for everything you love,” and his sentiments were echoed by Michael Klamerus on his blog.

I'm not happy about AI being welcomed into the Interactive Fiction community, but I also don’t think it’d be productive to advocate for my preferences — as Dias puts it, “the IF community has a certain trauma around gatekeeping of what 'counts as IF'.” I played and reviewed two AI-driven IFcomp entries from previous years, and they were both lacking. 

(I also remain viscerally offended by "You Will Thank Me as Fast as You Thank a Werewolf," a non-interactive, procedurally generated text that was dumped into IFcomp five years ago and ranked dead last.) 

I've given up on writing reviews for IFcomp. This year I don’t even know whether I’m going to play any entries. I don’t want to deal with the extra work of sifting through titles to find ones that aren’t AI-enabled, and Dias lays out the problem with submitting ratings:

Theoretically, you could rate the AI entries at a 0; whether you bother to 'play' them at first […but] summarily nuking them is a pretty obvious violation of the judge rules. I don't want to participate in a way that will be read by comp organizers as bad faith.

Alternatively, you can play and rate only entries that don't use AI. This would seem to be 'fine' but it creates a dynamic where the only people willing to play and rate the AI entries are people who are not going to object to them on grounds that they are AI, and thus they're getting judged by a different standard than everyone else's work. This means that the final result of the competition is at risk of legitimizing AI use or worse, making someone who put out real work feel bad that they placed behind someone who put out slop.

So that’s what’s up with entertainment. In the news, Ryan Walters has resigned as state superintendent of Oklahoma Schools, which is notable for his impressive track record of generating horrifying news headlines due to terrible judgment.

There was is drive to start teaching the bible in schools. When the state Department of Education revealed its requirements for the bibles it would use, it turned out that, “there are very few Bibles on the market that would meet these criteria, and all of them have been endorsed by former President Donald Trump.”

He announced that out-of-state teachers would need to take an “America First” test before they could teach in Oklahoma. (It turns out that the test wasn’t much more than a way to deliver marketing leads to PragerU.)

And he wanted to set up chapters of Turning Point USA (Charlie Kirk’s conservative organization) at every Oklahoma high school, but it looks like he resigned before that happened.

His biography isn’t complete without discussing that time an image of a naked woman was displayed on a TV in his office during a school board meeting. It could have been a bizarre accident! But we’ll never know, because Walters denied it happened, falsely claimed to have been cleared before an investigation was complete, and insisted that anyone who said it happened was lying.

In gaming, I’m giving myself permission to quit Backpack Hero. It received a lot of enthusiastic praise on social media, but I kind of hate it? I’ve gone into it a few times trying to see if it gets good, but there are better ways to spend my time.

 

Image credit: Mote Oo Education / Pixabay

News You Can Lose

I still like the idea of blogging regularly about relevant news stories, but you never know what's worth writing about as the start of a bigger, long-term story.

Like that time I got laid off by my (former!) company's Chief Marketing Officer because he outsourced my entire department* — layoffs aren't particularly newsworthy, but five years later I'd learn that he (allegedly!) did it as part of a plot to embezzle more than $5 million.

In the present day, there's a lot of talk about people being replaced by generative AI. The adult industry, long recognized as one of tech's early adopters, has two sides of the story about its use managing OnlyFans audiences.  

• One NSFW creator is very happy with the way generative AI allows her to engage with larger numbers of fans (and how it works to charge those fans the upper limit of what they're willing to pay). She's very thoughtful about the nature of the service she's providing — pointing out that even SFW personalities involve teams of people working to create a fictionalized version of an identity; she sees AI as just another component of that team creating a fantasy for the audience. She also points out that while using AI breaks the rules set by OnlyFans, many of its other rules are broken on a regular basis. ("So as long as they're making money and it's not related to minors, they're probably going to turn a blind eye.")
  
  
• In the Philippines, people at OnlyFans "management companies" experience bleak working conditions that are only getting worse. Sales quotas are increasing and their transcripts are being used to train AI "which would replace the worst performers on the team." They're also aware that their work skirts the OnlyFans' terms and conditions, but they have their own workaround. ("The chatbot generates a message and the creator or a human worker hits send, allowing companies to comply with OnlyFans’ requirement that only humans send messages from a creator’s inbox.")

Elsewhere on the topic of "getting paid to tell lies that people want to believe," I am concerned about the vacancy at the head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

As a former Fed economist put it, "Large, unpredictable shifts in economic policy are placing unusual strains on our measurement apparatus because they are causing large, unpredictable changes in the behavior of consumers and businesses. These changes are difficult to measure in real time." Measurement difficulties resulted in the previous BLS head losing her job. 

Her suggested replacement, E.J. Antoni:

• Was identified on the east and west sides of the Capitol among the crowds involved in the Jan. 6 riot,
  
  
• Proudly displayed artwork in his office that commemorates a Nazi battleship,
  
  
• Shares a name with a Twitter account that actively promoted harmful conspiracy theories,  
  
  
• Has only one published economics paper, but several partisan blog posts, and
  
  
• Utterly lacks the credentials that would be necessary for someone serving in the position.

(Some corners of the internet are also referring to him as "Austrian Screech," and it's hard to disagree.) 

My main concern is that he's going to say whatever it takes to keep his patron happy without understanding the damage he's doing. Justin Wolfers has likened BLS data to essential infrastructure — getting it wrong will have ripple affects that cause problems in a variety of systems.   

Image credit: PaintedFeet01 / Pixabay

Permission to Quit

I’ve been struggling with games that stopped being fun (or never got fun in the first place).

• Bear and Breakfast: This game progressed smoothly, I enjoyed unlocking different properties, and it was fun designing room layouts that maximized revenue while meeting the minimum requirements for room bonuses. But I’m at the point where upkeep involves too much cognitive load. By the time I’m done crossing the map to keep up with various maintenance tasks, I forgot what goal I was working on — it’s the doorway effect. There are too many moving pieces to track now, and I can’t tell whether I’m moving forward or just running in place.
  
  
• Beholder: This game was dismal. It’s not actually fun to be a low-level cog in an oppressive state apparatus? I’ve heard that Papers, Please does fun things in this vein, but Beholder’s economy is difficult to follow — some of the characters made absolutely impossible demands early on, and I had no idea how to satisfy them. I couldn’t get a handle on how money, information, social status, surveillance equipment, and black market goods can be exchanged for profit. It feels like a game that wants to set up some weighty ethical dilemmas, but they're pretty easy to sidestep if you just stop playing.
  
  
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance. This is one of the most detailed flower-picking simulators I’ve ever seen. I liked that your character can build experience in any one of a million skills, but I didn’t like how experience only comes from successfully using those skills. It took me six hours to find a bow, and I can’t afford enough arrows to practice with it. I can forget about pickpocketing — I keep getting caught and needing to skip town without ever improving. Meanwhile, my gear wears out and I burn through piles of money getting it cleaned and repaired. Gathering herbs is a way to make ends meet, but it has been a tedious, repetitive slog trying to build a character that’s fun to play. I need to stop expecting that that will change.
  
  
• Moonring: It’s a neat idea, but this game will not run smoothly on my computer. It’s incredibly frustrating to struggle with a game recreating Apple IIe graphics that can’t match an Apple IIe’s processing speed. (Look, I’m aware it’s probably doing super complicated stuff under the hood, but my user experience has been laggy and disappointing.) I barely started exploring the first dungeon, but the delay between entering a command and seeing it play out is absolutely killing me. Fiddling with my system settings hasn’t helped.
  
  
• Secret of Darkwoods: This is some AI-generated bullshit. I can’t complain too much, because it was free, but it feels like I’m flipping through somebody else’s completed book of Mad Libs. “Go to [location] and [interact] with [NPC]. Collect [treasure and/or stat bonus].” According to Steam, I’ve already put in more than the average amount of time needed to complete the game. The main quest is supposed to unearth the main character's mysterious backstory, but it hasn't captured my interest and it’s impossible to tell how much more time I'll need because the story progression is so haphazard.

I do try to put some effort into keeping track of which games I have played and completed, so I'm officially noting my intent to put these aside. There are other, more entertaining ways to spend my time. 

I can also spend less time playing games and more time getting creative. On LinkedIn, Small Loan Studio is running a 28-day tiny creativity jam. Each day is a single-word prompt and some encouragement to create a single piece of art every day over 4 weeks. (I think it officially started on August 1, but you can still start it up and follow the 28 prompts on whatever schedule works for you.)  

Elsewhere on the internet, it's Blaugust. It's worth watching, and people are having fun with it this year. 

Image credit: wiredsmartio / Pixabay

We've Been Here Before

(Alternate title: Too Many People are Thinking of the Children)

I’m trying to figure out how to implement a practice of regular updates — something like either the Media Notes or 5 Things format that loudpoet uses. (We'll see whether it's sustainable over the long term.) 

...but I never know where to start with news coverage/commentary. There’s too much to mention and it’s impossible to track it over time. Which stories are going to be ongoing developments and which ones will end up forgotten? 

There was a legitimate political assassination in mid-June, and it got lost in the cracks between the president’s humiliating birthday parade and the armed occupation of Los Angeles. And while those stories were crazy enough to make everyone forget how Social Security data was compromised and the White House served as a car dealership, they were still eclipsed by the uproar that accompanied the public's re-discovery of existing Jeffrey Epstein information. 

(And that recap omits the “Big, Beautiful Bill” travesty.)

It might make more sense to stick with more game-focused news. The story there has been payment processors restricting access to online storefronts. It looks a lot like the 2021 crackdown on adult content, but as Thomas Manuel notes:

This coincides with some weird stuff out of the UK where a law is forcing websites to verify people’s ages before they give them access to information that might not be suitable for children. It’s a weirdly synchronous attack on freedom of expression — an uncoordinated public-private partnership that threatens the few remaining fun/free spaces on the internet.

Payment processors Visa and Mastercard are facing some resistance for this move, and the U.K. age verification scheme has encountered its own issues; people can bypass U.K. protection measures by presenting video game screenshots in lieu of actual age verification. However:

It could affect this year's Interactive Fiction Competition.  

Image credit: Ksenia Chernaya  / Pexels